Article updated on 06.01.22
That’s it, we have decided to leave everything behind and go on a trip without a return ticket… Before enjoying this unforgettable experience, we have a lot of work to do from an administrative point of view. In this article, we will explain you all the steps we went through because we noticed that more than one person was interested 😉 A trip around the world is not that simple…
First step, we ask around our friends who have already left for a trip around the world and we already receive a lot of advice. Then, we spend long hours reading travelers’ blogs, reading general conditions for insurance and calling administrations to find the information we are looking for.
Second step, we take action… here is the summary of our checklist:
- Give away your apartment
- Cancel your WIFI and mobile subscription
- (Re)do your passport
- Apply for visas
- Buy your plane ticket
- Make appointments with doctors and dentists
- Unregister from the commune
- Get an international credit card
- Sell your car
- Cancel your insurance (health, civil liability, legal)
- Apply for a worldwide insurance with GObyAVA
- Complete the AVS affiliation form to continue contributing
- Contact SERAFE to be reimbursed for the radio and television fees
- Buy the international driving permit
- Determine a mail forwarding to a relative
- Give a procuration to your relatives to collect the registered mail
5 months before the departure of the world tour
Give away your apartment
To begin with, we contacted our real estate agency to find out how to terminate our lease. We were not in the time frame (our lease is from September to September) so we had to send a registered letter to notify them of our departure. After that, we took beautiful pictures of the apartment and put it on Anibis and Facebook Market. We sent in the file of a solvent person and as soon as that person signed their lease agreement, we were officially released from our contract.
Cancel your WIFI and mobile subscription
We contacted by phone our wifi operator to announce our departure from Switzerland. We did not have any fees because we had a contract with them for more than 2 years. These fees vary according to the operator (we were with Salt).
As for the telephone subscription, we modified our offer to have access to a European network with the USA included. With our subscription, we will be able to have 30GO of internet in the USA per month. We chose this option because the internet gigas are expensive in the USA. We will continue to do small digital mandates so having internet access is a real need for us. However, we will try to cancel our subscription when we are in Central America… to be continued.
4 months before the big departure
(Re)do your passport
If, like us, you are planning a trip outside of Europe, you must obtain a passport or redo it if it is out of date. It takes 1 month to make an appointment at the Identity Documents Center and about 7 days after the appointment to receive the passport by registered mail.
Apply for visas
Depending on the country where you plan to go on a trip around the world, find out about the different visas, their rates and especially the waiting time.
We wanted to make a special visa for the USA but we were too late. The waiting time for the appointment was more than 2 months and for us it was too short a time. So we changed our travel plans and did the ESTA with which we can stay “only” 3 months in the USA.
3 months before the departure of the big trip
Buy your plane ticket
As soon as we had our passports up to date and our ESTA, we bought our plane ticket. We made a rather complete article to explain our advice on buying a plane ticket. Depending on your trip around the world, this article will be useful.
Make appointments with doctors and dentists
Once our departure date was set, we made the appointments for the general check-ups with the doctors.
Appointments at the general practitioner to check if we had the vaccines up to date and to ask for a prescription for some medicines. For information, the doctor gave us this website “Healthy Travel” which is regularly updated. It allows us to check the vaccines required according to the country: see the website here.
We also went to the hygienist and to the dentist to have our teeth scaled and checked to avoid having a problem on the other side of the world.
And for Audrey, an appointment with the gynecologist for the annual appointment before the departure.
Unregister from the commune
This step was the most complicated of what we had heard and read. We were lucky because as soon as we presented ourselves to the commune of Martigny, they directly proposed to us to “unsubscribe” and to put us in status “globe-trotter”. For more detailed information on the subject, go to on the Novo-Monde blog article which explains the whole process in detail.
To validate our departure and receive our certificate of departure, we had to go through several steps. First, we had to pay in advance for our electricity because they read the meter every X time and want to make sure we pay before we leave. If we had paid too much, the company would have refunded us on our credit card.
Once this step was paid and validated, we went to the Tax Office to ask for our tax return for the current year. We had to fill in the declaration by paper because the VSTax application was not yet ready for the current year (we were in March). After this step, we had to wait for the Service Cantonal des Contributions to contact us in order to pay the penalty (the tax bill for the current year).
After having paid the taxes, we had to go back to the commune so that they could provide us with this certificate of departure. At the same time they gave us back our act of origin.
Get an international credit card
It is important to plan this step in advance in order to avoid paying bank fees during a round the world trip. We each have different bank cards; a Revolut, a Neon, a Postale Visa and a Postale Debit. For more information, Novo-Monde wrote a great article here.
- Our credit card Revolut, allows us to withdraw up to 200.00 per month and pay free of charge in the local currency.
- Our credit card Néon, allows us to withdraw with a fee of 1.5% which is still interesting if we have no other solution and we can pay by card without fees in the local currency.
- Our credit card Postale Visa, allows us to pay by card without charge in the local currency.
- Our credit card Postale Debit with the SmartPlus account, allows us to withdraw worldwide without fees.
2 months before the departure of the world tour
Sell your car
We made the choice to sell our little doblo because we don’t know when we will return from our trip and don’t want to store it somewhere.
As soon as we sold the car, we cancelled the car registration and put the plates on it, so the insurance was also cancelled automatically.
Cancel your insurance
The certificate of departure of the commune is like your graal, it allows you to cancel all your insurances and thus to save a lot of money.
So we sent this certificate to our health, legal and civil liability insurances. For our complementary insurance, we were lucky because we could put it on hold for a maximum of 30 months by paying only 20% per month. We made this choice because it is complicated to start a new complementary insurance after having cancelled it in Switzerland.
1 month before departure
Apply for a worldwide insurance with GObyAVA
After cancelling our insurance policies in Switzerland, we still had to find a health insurance policy in case anything happened to us during our round-the-world trip.
We quickly opted for GObyAVA which offers a very high quality service. We subrcibe for the plan Plan Santé AVAnture qwhich covers us for a year for any medical expenses incurred during our trip.
This insurance was attractive to us for a number of reasons. Firstly, it offers all the basic services (medical expenses, repatriation assistance, civil liability, etc) at very attractive rates.
Secondly, it’s an insurance company on a human scale, so as soon as we contacted them to ask our questions, we were immediately in contact with one of the managers, who took the time to answer all our questions.
And finally, they offer a service AVA Tech+ that insures electronic devices in the event of theft or breakage. This was a very important point for us, given that we work in the digital sector and have several electronic devices as work tools.
Complete the AVS affiliation form
It is important to fill out the AVS affiliation form to continue to contribute during a trip in order to avoid having a large “hole” for retirement.
This process takes about 3 weeks. We were a little late so we made a note of our parents’ mailing address so that they could receive the mail.
Contact SERAFE
After receiving our certificate of departure, we also contacted SERAFE by phone to ask them for a refund of our radio and television licence fee. There are no small savings ;).
2 weeks before the departure of the big trip
Buy the international driving permit
In the canton of Wallis, we can ask for an international permit at the TCS or at some specific places (you have to call the TCS to know more). We applied for our international permit at the tourist office in Martigny.
Determine a mail forwarding to a relative
From a postal login, we were able to redirect our mail to a relative in case we receive mail during our trip. There were 3 options 35.- for 6 months, 45.- for 12 months and 55.- for 18 months (more information here). We chose the last option, you can never be too sure.
Give a procuration to collect the registered mail
Again, via the login post, we made a procuration to one of our relatives so that he/she can get our registered mail back in case (more information here). This service costs CHF 24.00.
If this relative is a member of your family with the same lastname, the post office has informed us that there is no need to make this procuration.
Now, all you have to do is to prepare your travel bag and go live your best life.
Don’t hesitate to comment on this article if you have any questions or comments about the administrative steps to prepare your trip around the world.
De l’inspiration à la réalisation,
GObyAVA vous accompagne pour tous vos voyages
Did you like the article?
Pin it !
Leave a Reply